{"id":6041,"date":"2018-02-22T08:11:02","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T13:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=6041"},"modified":"2018-02-22T08:21:01","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T13:21:01","slug":"anne-sexton-barbara-swan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/02\/22\/anne-sexton-barbara-swan\/","title":{"rendered":"How Poet Anne Sexton And Painter Barbara Swan Reimagined Grimms\u2019 Fairy Tales For the Feminist 1970s"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI was able to do something maybe wilder than I would have on my own,\u201d the Boston artist Barbara Swan<\/a> would say about her illustrations for Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston poet Anne Sexton\u2019s 1971 book of poems inspired by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.<\/p>\n

In this book, \u201cTransformations,\u201d Sexton reimagines the old folk stories for the feminist 1970s. Her poems are observational and acid and witty. She begins with pointed interludes about society, then retells the fairy tales with contemporary references and snarky asides and probing \u201cpsychological relationships\u201d (as Swan put it).<\/p>\n

\u201cInside many of us \/ is a small old man \/ who wants to get out,\u201d Sexton writes in \u201cRumpelstiltskin.\u201d \u201cHe is a monster of despair. \/ He is all decay. \/ He speaks up as tiny as an earphone \/ with Truman\u2019s asexual voice: \/ I am your dwarf. \/ I am the enemy within. \/ I am the boss of your dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swan\u2019s interpretations in scratchy pen accented with a bit of gray wash\u2014featured in \u201cBarbara Swan: Drawings for \u2018Transformations\u2019\u201d at Boston\u2019s Alpha Gallery<\/a> through Feb. 28\u2014are intimate and barbed and funny.<\/p>\n

\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Swan “Snow White,” 1970-71, ink on paper. (Courtesy of Alpha Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An old witch hugs the young Rapunzel, who she\u2019s imprisoned (Sexton depicts them as lovers), close to her. (Pictured at top.) Red Riding Hood\u2019s woodsman presses his ear to the grandmother-wolf\u2019s belly to detect traces of the grandmother and girl swallowed inside. The Twelve Dancing Princesses sneak off for midnight revels in a composition that might suggest lady parts. Snow White and her queen stepmother rival each other in the magic mirror.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer stepmother \/ a beauty in her own right, \/ though eaten, of course, by age, \/ would hear of no beauty surpassing her own,\u201d Sexton writes in \u201cSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs.\u201d \u201cBeauty is a simple passion, \/ but, oh my friends, in the end \/ you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s a sort of dramatic theatrical sense of confrontation \u2026 in the Queen and little Snow White, between the aging beauty and the young beauty, and this is a universal theme,\u201d Swan said in Smithsonian Archives of American Art oral history interviews<\/a> in 1973 and \u201974. \u201cShe sent me \u2018Snow White\u2019 and the minute I read it, I called her up and I says, oh, my God, Anne, I says, I love that poem, and I says I’ve got to tell you I identify with that poor old queen and Anne says so do I.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swan says in her drawing \u201cyou get the old queen and she’s\u2014I put, you know, false eyelashes and she’s been to the hair dresser. She’s got every part going for her. On the other hand, to me, Snow White is terribly smug and complacent and all she’s got going for her is she’s so damn young, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Swan “Self-Portrait with Bottles and Envelopes,” 1982, oil on canvas. (Courtesy of Alpha Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Swan (1922-2003) was born in Newton. She studied art history at Wellesley College, then art-making at Boston\u2019s School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1943 to \u201947. There she became steeped in the abject Boston Expressionism of Karl Zerbe, the head of the painting department (she was his teaching assistant during her fifth year), and other teachers there\u2014the subjective views, the emotional color, the agitated brushwork, the warped realism, the continued interest exploring the psychology of people.<\/p>\n

\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Swan “Portrait of Ann Sexton,” 1960s, ink on paper. (Courtesy of Alpha Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Many of Swan\u2019s artworks from the 1940s and \u201850s were portraits of friends and family. She liked to begin with the eyes and work out. Unusual for the macho, male-dominated American art world of the time, she sometimes places you in a mother\u2019s perspective\u2014as in her 1956 painting \u201cThe Nest,\u201d a self-portrait gazing down from above her head as she nurses her infant son.<\/p>\n

During the 1960s, her style became cooler as she embarked on a long series of still-life paintings of tall cylindrical bottles filled with water, a classic painting subject to explore and toy with perception and realist rendering. She depicted the ways glass and water become lenses warping our vision of people, dolls, eggs, \u00a0striped fabric and pictures (Renaissance paintings, Edvard Munch, 19th century American scenes, magazines). She also seemed to contemplate women and sexuality in our society in charged still-lifes of naked dolls, old timey erotica and vintage gossip magazines that became surreal scenes when looked at through the warping lenses of her bottles in paintings like \u201cInner Life\u201d (1977), \u201cBlonde Hussy\u201d (1986) and \u201cLes Femmes\u201d (1990).<\/p>\n

Swan met Sexton (1928-1974) when they were both part of the first group of Bunting Fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (now the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study Harvard University) in Cambridge in the early 1960s. The idea seems to have been to foster collaboration between women in differing fields.<\/p>\n

\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Swan “Red Riding Hood,” 1970-71, ink on paper. (Courtesy of Alpha Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cShe’s a confessional poet and we have this great rapport because we understand this gut thing between the human and the human condition,\u201d Swan said in Smithsonian Archives of American Art oral history interviews in 1973 and \u201974.<\/p>\n

Their first collaboration may have been a poster or broadside built around Sexton\u2019s poem \u201cFor The Year Of The Insane.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe has had a great deal of emotional trauma. She’s been institutionalized. She’s had breakdowns and this is all very much in her poetry,\u201d Swan said. (Sexton would commit suicide in 1974.)<\/p>\n

In the introduction to \u201cTransformations,\u201d Kurt Vonnegut wrote: Anne Sexton \u201cdomesticates my terror, examines it and describes it, teaches it some tricks that will amuse me, then lets it gallop wild in the forest once more,\u201d<\/p>\n

Swan said, \u201cI make out fine collaborating with her because, you see, my work, if you look around, you know, there’s this kind of haunting sense of personal and tragic sense in some of my prints and\u2014and the kind of human relationship which is full of a certain kind of haunting anguish. So when I moved into Anne’s world, I found that it was very\u2014I was comfortable dealing with that kind of image.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Swan “Twelve Dancing Princesses,” 1970-71, ink on paper. (Courtesy of Alpha Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI was able to do something maybe wilder than I would have on my own,\u201d the Boston artist Barbara Swan would say about her illustrations for Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston poet Anne Sexton\u2019s 1971 book of poems inspired by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. In this book, \u201cTransformations,\u201d Sexton reimagines the old folk stories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6065,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,107],"tags":[295,37,98,21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6041"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6069,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041\/revisions\/6069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}